CHRIS: There's nothing like having an MVP to push into production in a smaller subset of work, a smaller unit of work, that is working software that is pushed into production, even if, again, it's not really a main line, or it's not necessarily a risk for the eCommerce business, the nature of pushing things into production. This is a forcing function to establish best practices for a group of people.
And no matter how disciplined and how excellent they are and how much experience they have, this is typically a positive thing. So, that's why you see, in software, a lot of times there's this exponential decay in value with larger capital allotment. Like, you put more money in, but you don't necessarily get a linear increase with more money, more results. A lot of times it's with more money, you actually get fewer results.
So you have to be careful and take it in chunks and measure the performance. And so that's why you see a lot of Agile Scrum, breaking the work into chunks and that's where we have this idea of an MVP. And you can do this in different ways. A lot of what we like to do—because a lot of our clients know what they need as a baseline, again, they have experience with successfully operating an online eCommerce marketplace—we know that they need maybe six months of effort to be expended to get what they need done. But during the course of that six months, we need to be reconciling every month that everything is working from that month that we completed. And that's a really healthy best practice as well.
I don't know if you want to chime in there on that, Ron, and thoughts on this depending on where the business is at as well.
RON: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You and I work together 13 years, and we've together seen well over a thousand projects. What do we say on timeline? I'm trying to remember, there was a Harvard quote that says 97% of all projects go over budget and over time. So this section we're talking about, this particular video planning, is by far and away the most important.
And timeline is one of them because that's one that seems to kill people a lot. They make their plans for their project around some event coming up, or they make they put some hard timeline on something. The thing is, we're dealing with marketplace software, we're dealing with customizations. I like to whenever I sell a project, I like to have a first initial kickoff meeting. And one of the tips and tricks I give them is I'd like to say, look, this is like going to war. The success of your project is not tied to how well your project goes at all, because you're going to run into issues. And the issues can be technical. They can be somebody getting sick and missing a day.
What happens when you're a developer who's in the middle of a sprint to create a marketplace website, gets sick and they get COVID? You can't plan for that. And that can affect the timeline. It's not like you can just bring another developer in off another project that's in the middle of their sprint and they can just pick up and go forward and finish out your sprint. I mean, it literally affects the project. So you need to plan for issues and you need to plan on how you're going to address those issues.
So you need to have contingencies built into the timeline as well, not just the budget, but how are you going to work with this vendor? I always like to say the success of your project is directly tied to how well you work with your vendor when these issues arise. And thing is, you don't know what those issues are going to be. They could be budgetary, they could be technical, they could be timeline. You could have someone get sick, someone could leave your team, you could have somebody quit. I mean, it doesn't really matter what it is.
I've had customers that are launching products and we're building their marketplace website to launch the product, and they had problems with the product going into production and their product delayed. And they had PR and press releases and all kinds of things aligned, and it all just fell apart and they had no contingency plan, right? And it was all on their end.
So with timeline, really the best thing is plan, make contingencies, and understand there are going to be issues with your timeline. And that's really where a good relationship with your project manager helps, because really all you need is full transparency, right? Hey, I think there's going to be a problem. So-and-so's out with COVID. It might affect this thing. Okay, what's our contingency? What's our risk plan are we going to do?
The way Chris articulated the different phases, part of making those different phases on paper, unable to help address these types of issues, might be prioritizing them. Okay. Well, here's the 27 features we're hoping to have in the panacea. This is every single one of them. You know, these three? Yeah, they're a dream. We doubt we're going to have them. We doubt we're going to be able to afford them. But if we could get a man, that would be really cool. Great. Let's put that out. There is the lowest priority. Those are fives. Here's a couple that are force that if something happens, we can move these out. We don't have to have them.
And then when you get into the ones, twos and threes, ones are we can't launch the MVP in this limited release like Chris talked about, those are the ones. Twos are a man. This would be great if we could get any of these in here, this would be great. But if we don't get them in, in the initial MVP, these are immediately the things we're going to start working on. And then threes would be the stretch, right?
So you've got your have to have you've got your goal and then you've got your stretch and then you've got this other bucket that if they don't get done, you know that in the next six months, once you launch, once you get going, those are going to be the next steps, the things you're going to be working on. You always have a plan.
So I think that covered timeline, do you have anything else you want to add on timeline for an marketplace business? Before we go on to government governance?
CHRIS: I just wanted to reinforce that what you said about prioritizing in in those details around basically putting numbers on them that is so, so helpful for communicating within the group, both within your internal team and with your partners that you're working with. So I think that's a great way to articulate that.